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Political analyst every first Monday of every month through the 2004 election. Mr. Hulet has appeared on Fox T.V., CNN, C-Span, Daybreak, and CNN Entertainment News,The Arsenio Hall Show, Carl Wiglesworth (KTSA, San Antonio); Dave Ross (KIRO, Seattle); Mike Siegel (for 20 years on seven stations); "Up-Front" with Robert Mak, (KING 5 T.V., Seattle); and hundreds of T.V. and radio shows over some twenty-five years. He was the first guest to appear live in Washington D.C. on the Jim Bohannon Show five minutes after George Bushs September 20th, 2001 terrorism speech, as a terrorism expert and again January 30, 2003: He argued then, Bush was not telling the American people everything and we are facing something far worse than classical terrorism. America is facing a newer, higher level of global urban guerrilla warfare, side by side with the terrorism we have come to understand; that it is a violent reaction to the worldwide perception of an American-led Corporate Empire can no longer be ignored. He has consulted over 35 major corporations, Congress, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives of the U.S. Department of Justice (formerly Treasury's ATF&E) now with Homeland Security; Ms Tina Sinatra; Mr. Oliver Stone among other Hollywood producers, directors and stars. The movie Bulworth was an ugly parody of Hulet's work during the Los Angeles riots by Warren Beatty. Congress of the United States
recent Homeland Security purchases - 1 million rounds ammunition 9 mm .40 caliber , 70,000 M4's APC armored vehicles - Domestic use? - Biden says get a shotgun Craig Hulet, Stanton Friedman, Noe Torres Analyst of geopolitics and foreign policy Craig B. Hulet discussed the use of drones in war zones, as well as potential drone strikes on U.S. citizens. He also addressed concerns about the government trying to curb gun rights, and other freedoms. One of the biggest problems with unmanned drones is that "they are absolutely terrible at marksmanship. The collateral damage is always horrendous," he stated, explaining that typically 10-30 civilians are killed when going after a single al-Qaeda terrorist. The drones have no capability of having laser guided missiles or precision targeting, he continued. The US is not "winning the war" in Afghanistan, and has increasingly used drones because they can't sustain this level of warfare any longer, he added.
Obama has been secretive about how the drones are being used, and one of his administration's goals is to have 3,500 drone bases around the world, including domestic, Hulet said. Drones are already in the air in 11 major American cities, including Seattle, where protests against their use have taken place, he reported. Hulet described an incident in North Dakota where a drone was used to assist a SWAT team that came to arrest an armed man accused of stealing cattle. The explanation for the drone's presence was that it was there to secure the safety of the SWAT team.
In what he considers an erosion of citizens' rights and privacy, Air Force drones can now legally spy on you, TSA's "mission creep" is making the country a police state, California is using face recognition scanners to spy on people, and Obama's executive order expands Homeland Security into local law enforcement.
EXCLUSIVE: Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans Khaled Abdullah / Reuters Tribesmen this week examine the rubble of a building in southeastern Yemen where American teenager Abdulrahmen al-Awlaki and six suspected al-Qaida militants were killed in a U.S. drone strike on Oct. 14, 2011. Al-Awlaki, 16, was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in a similar strike two weeks earlier. By Michael Isikoff National Investigative Correspondent, NBC News
A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be senior operational leaders of al -Qaida or an associated force -- even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S. The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administrations most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes. Advertise | AdChoices The secrecy surrounding such strikes is fast emerging as a central issue in this weeks hearing of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, a key architect of the drone campaign, to be CIA director. Brennan was the first administration official to publicly acknowledge drone strikes in a speech last year, calling them consistent with the inherent right of self-defense. In a separate talk at the Northwestern University Law School in March, Attorney General Eric Holder specifically endorsed the constitutionality of targeted killings of Americans, saying they could be justified if government officials determine the target poses an imminent threat of violent attack. But the confidential Justice Department white paper introduces a more expansive definition of self defense or imminent attack than described by Brennan or Holder in their public speeches. It refers, for example, to what it calls a broader concept of imminence than actual intelligence about any ongoing plot against the U.S. homeland. Michael Isikoff, national investigative correspondent for NBC News, talks with Rachel Maddow about a newly obtained, confidential Department of Justice white paper that hints at the details of a secret White House memo that explains the legal justifications for targeted drone strikes that kill Americans without trial in the name of national security. The condition that an operational leader present an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future, the memo states. Read the entire 'white paper' on drone strikes on Americans Instead, it says, an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been recently involved in activities posing a threat of
a violent attack and there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities. The memo does not define recently or activities. As in Holders speech, the confidential memo lays out a three-part test that would make targeted killings of American lawful: In addition to the suspect being an imminent threat, capture of the target must be infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to law of war principles. But the memo elaborates on some of these factors in ways that go beyond what the attorney general said publicly. For example, it states that U.S. officials may consider whether an attempted capture of a suspect would pose an undue risk to U.S. personnel involved in such an operation. If so, U.S. officials could determine that the capture operation of the targeted American would not be feasible, making it lawful for the U.S. government to order a killing instead, the memo concludes. The undated memo is entitled Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qaida or An Associated Force. It was provided to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by administration officials on the condition that it be kept confidential and not discussed publicly. Although not an official legal memo, the white paper was represented by administration officials as a policy document that closely mirrors the arguments of classified memos on targeted killings by the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel, which provides authoritative legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies. The administration has refused to turn over to Congress or release those memos publicly -- or even publicly confirm their existence. A source with access to the white paper, which is not classified, provided a copy to NBC News. This is a chilling document, said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, which is suing to obtain administration memos about the targeted killing of Americans. Basically, it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. It recognizes some limits on the authority it sets out, but the limits are elastic and vaguely defined, and its easy to see how they could be manipulated. Advertise | AdChoices In particular, Jaffer said, the memo redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the white paper. The spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, instead pointed to public speeches by what she called a parade of administration officials, including Brennan, Holder, former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh and former Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson that she said outlined the legal framework for such operations.
Pressure for turning over the Justice Department memos on targeted killings of Americans appears to be building on Capitol Hill amid signs that Brennan will be grilled on the subject at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. On Monday, a bipartisan group of 11 senators -- led by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to release all Justice Department memos on the subject. While accepting that there will clearly be circumstances in which the president has the authority to use lethal force against Americans who take up arms against the country, it said, It is vitally important ... for Congress and the American public to have a full understanding of how the executive branch interprets the limits and boundaries of this authority. Anticipating domestic boom, colleges rev up drone piloting programs The completeness of the administrations public accounts of its legal arguments was also sharply criticized last month by U.S. Judge Colleen McMahon in response to a lawsuit brought by the New York Times and the ACLU seeking access to the Justice Department memos on drone strikes targeting Americans under the Freedom of Information Act. McMahon, describing herself as being caught in a veritable Catch-22, said she was unable to order the release of the documents given the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for the conclusion a secret. In her ruling, McMahon noted that administration officials had engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of citizens. But, she wrote, they have done so in cryptic and imprecise ways, generally without citing any statute or court decision that justifies its conclusions. In one passage in Holders speech at Northwestern in March, he alluded without spelling outthat there might be circumstances where the president might order attacks against American citizens without specific knowledge of when or where an attack against the U.S. might take place. The Constitution does not require the president to delay action until some theoretical end -stage of planning, when the precise time, place and manner of an attack become clear, he said. But his speech did not contain the additional language in the white paper suggesting that no active intelligence about a specific attack is needed to justify a targeted strike. Similarly, Holder said in his speech that targeted killings of Americans can be justified if capture is not feasible. But he did not include language in the white paper saying that an operation might not be feasible if it could not be physically effectuated during the relevant window of opportunity or if the relevant country (where the target is located) were to decline to consent to a capture op eration. The speech also made no reference to
the risk that might be posed to U.S. forces seeking to capture a target, as was mentioned in the white paper. The white paper also includes a more extensive discussion of why targeted strikes against Americans does not violate constitutional protections afforded American citizens as well as a U.S. law that criminalizes the killing of U.S. nationals overseas. It also discusses why such targeted killings would not be a war crime or violate a U.S. executive order banning assassinations. A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination, the white paper reads. In the Departments view, a lethal operation conducted against a U.S. citizen whose conduct poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States would be a legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban. Similarly, the use of lethal force, consistent with the laws of war, against an individual who is a legitimate military target would be lawful and would not violate the assassination ban. More from Open Channel: After ethics complaint, Sen. Menendez pays $58,500 for flights to Dominican Republic Exclusive: Your employer may share your salary, and Equifax might sell that data Anticipating domestic boom, colleges rev up drone piloting programs Someone Just Leaked Obama's Rules for Assassinating American Citizens Mike Riggs|Feb. 4, 2013 9:36 pm For over a year now journalists, civil liberties advocates, and members of Congress have been asking the Obama administration to release internal memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel justifying Obama's targeted killing program. While the White House continues to deny that such memos exist, NBC is reporting that it has acquired the next best thing: A secretish 16-
page white paper from the Department of Justice that was provided to select members of the Senate last June. Michael Isikoff reports that [t]he 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administrations most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes. [T]he confidential Justice Department white paper introduces a more expa nsive definition of selfdefense or imminent attack than described by Brennan or Holder in their public speeches. It refers, for example, to what it calls a broader concept of imminence than actual intelligence about any ongoing plot against the U.S. homeland. Instead, it says, an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been recently involved in activities posing a threat of a violent attack and there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities. The memo does not define recently or activities. Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens The president's partisan lawyers purport to vest him with the most extreme power a political leader can seize Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 February 2013 10.56 EST Barack Obama Photograph: Reuters
The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki's 16-yearold American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen. Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama's top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president's power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title "disposition matrix". When the New York Times back in April, 2010 first confirmed the existence of Obama's hit list, it made clear just what an extremist power this is, noting: "It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing." The NYT quoted a Bush intelligence official as saying "he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president". When the existence of Obama's hit list was first reported several months earlier by the Washington Post's Dana Priest, she wrote that the "list includes three Americans". What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch - with no checks or oversight of any kind - but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president's underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president - at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as "Terror Tuesday" - then chooses from "baseball cards" and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark. In fact, The Most Transparent Administration Ever has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power. During the Bush years, when Bush refused to disclose the memoranda from his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that legally authorized torture, rendition, warrantless eavesdropping and the like, leading Democratic lawyers such as Dawn Johnsen (Obama's first choice to lead the OLC) vehemently denounced this practice as a grave threat, warning that "the Bush Administration's excessive reliance on 'secret law' threatens the effective functioning of American democracy" and "the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government." But when it comes to Obama's assassination power, this is exactly what his administration has done. It has repeatedly refused to disclose the principal legal
memoranda prepared by Obama OLC lawyers that justified his kill list. It is, right now, vigorously resisting lawsuits from the New York Times and the ACLU to obtain that OLC memorandum. In sum, Obama not only claims he has the power to order US citizens killed with no transparency, but that even the documents explaining the legal rationale for this power are to be concealed. He's maintaining secret law on the most extremist power he can assert. Last night, NBC News' Michael Isikoff released a 16-page "white paper" prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama's power to target even Americans for assassination without due process (the memo is embedded in full below). This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama's kill list - that is still concealed - but it appears to track the reasoning of that memo as anonymously described to the New York Times in October 2011. This new memo is entitled: "Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa'ida or An Associated Force". It claims its conclusion is "reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal operation by the United States against a US citizen". Yet it is every bit as chilling as the Bush OLC torture memos in how its clinical, legalistic tone completely sanitizes the radical and dangerous power it purports to authorize. I've written many times at length about why the Obama assassination program is such an extreme and radical threat - see here for one of the most comprehensive discussions, with documentation of how completely all of this violates Obama and Holder's statements before obtaining power - and won't repeat those arguments here. Instead, there are numerous points that should be emphasized about the fundamentally misleading nature of this new memo:
driven the War on Terror since it commenced: if the US government simply asserts without evidence or trial that someone is a terrorist, then they are assumed to be, and they can then be punished as such - with indefinite imprisonment or death. But of course, when this memo refers to "a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida", what it actually means is this: someone whom the President - in total secrecy and with no due process - has accused of being that. Indeed, the memo itself makes this clear, as it baldly states that presidential assassinations are justified when "an informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US". This is the crucial point: the memo isn't justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that . The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo - and those who defend Obama's assassination power - willfully ignore it. Those who justify all of this by arguing that Obama can and should kill al-Qaida leaders who are trying to kill Americans are engaged in supreme question-begging. Without any due process, transparency or oversight, there is no way to know who is a "senior al-Qaida leader" and who is posing an "imminent threat" to Americans. All that can be known is who Obama, in total secrecy, accuses of this. (Indeed, membership in al-Qaida is not even required to be assassinated, as one can be a member of a group deemed to be an "associated force" of al-Qaida, whatever that might mean: a formulation so broad and ill-defined that, as Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller argues, it means the memo "authorizes the use of lethal force against individuals whose targeting is, without more, prohibited by international law".) The definition of an extreme authoritarian is one who is willing blindly to assume that government accusations are true without any evidence presented or opportunity to contest those accusations. This memo - and the entire theory justifying Obama's kill list - centrally relies on this authoritarian conflation of government accusations and valid proof of guilt. They are not the same and never have been. Political leaders who decree guilt in secret and with no oversight inevitably succumb to error and/or abuse of power. Such unchecked accusatory decrees are inherently untrustworthy (indeed, Yemen experts have vehemently contested the claim that Awlaki himself was a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat to the US). That's why due process is guaranteed in the Constitution and why judicial review of government accusations has been a staple of western justice since the Magna Carta: because leaders can't be trusted to decree guilt and punish citizens without evidence and an adversarial process. That is the age-old basic right on which this memo, and the Obama presidency, is waging war.
But this global-war theory is exactly what lies at heart of the Obama approach to Terrorism generally and this memo specifically. It is impossible to defend Obama's assassination powers without embracing it (which is why key Obama officials have consistently done so). That's because these assassinations are taking place in countries far from any war zone, such as Yemen and Somalia. You can't defend the application of "war powers" in these countries without embracing the once-verycontroversial Bush/Cheney view that the whole is now a "battlefield" and the president's war powers thus exist without geographic limits. This new memo makes clear that this Bush/Cheney worldview is at the heart of the Obama presidency. The president, it claims, "retains authority to use force against al-Qaida and associated forces outside the area of active hostilities". In other words: there are, subject to the entirely optional "feasibility of capture" element, no geographic limits to the president's authority to kill anyone he wants. This power applies not only to war zones, but everywhere in the world that he claims a member of al-Qaida is found. This memo embraces and institutionalizes the core Bush/Cheney theory that justified the entire panoply of policies Democrats back then pretended to find so objectionable.
no way coherent way to limit this power to places where capture is infeasible or to persons posing an "imminent" threat. The legal framework adopted by the memo means the president can kill anyone he claims is a member of al-Qaida regardless of where they are found or what they are doing. The only reason to add these limitations of "imminence" and "feasibility of capture" is, as Heller said, purely political: to make the theories more politically palatable. But the definitions for these terms are so vague and broad that they provide no real limits on the president's assassination power. As the ACLU's Jaffer says: "This is a chilling document" because "it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen" and the purported limits "are elastic and vaguely defined, and it's easy to see how they could be manipulated."
Obama is actually authorized to assassinate US citizens, the Obama DOJ went to extreme lengths to block the court from ruling on that question. They didn't want independent judges to determine the law. They wanted their own lawyers to do so. That's all this memo is: Obama-loyal appointees telling their leader that he has the authority to do what he wants. But in the warped world of US politics, this - secret memos from partisan lackeys has replaced judicial review as the means to determine the legality of the president's conduct.
imprison US citizens without charges and due process (or to eavesdrop on them) was so radical that, at the time, I could hardly believe they were being asserted out in the open. Yet here we are almost a full decade later. And we have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight. If you believe the president has the power to order US citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it's truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable.